“An enthralling docudrama that examines the Dutch master’s most famous painting, 'The Night Watch,' for proof that it was responsible for his dramatic fall from grace… brims with juicy conspiracy theories and forensic investigations.”
– Richard Kuipers, Variety

“Greenaway, a fanatic crusader against visual illiteracy and a semiotician with a vengeance, takes the painting apart, line by line, vector by vector, plane by plane, and reads it the way it was reading 1642 after Rembrandt completed it: as an outrageous piece of theater in which the painter bit the aristocratic hand that fed him by embedding within the painting a sensational charge of murder.”
– Harlan Jacobson, Film Comment

“Engrossing…continuously fascinating.” – Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International

Controversial British filmmaker Peter Greenaway never fails to astound, confound, titillate and provoke. Recently, he has turned his attention to reinterpreting great works of art. Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times: “If you’re in town for the Venice Biennale, don’t miss (Greenaway’s) marriage of High Renaissance painting and advanced technology that is ‘The Wedding at Cana’…possibly the best unmanned art history lecture you’ll ever experience.” Equally inventive is his REMBRANDT’S J’ACCUSE, a first-person analysis of ‘The Night Watch,’ the 1642 masterpiece on view in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Greenaway claims that the artist laid out dozens of clues regarding a murder — and for this indiscretion was forced into bankruptcy. Secret alliances, homosexual relationships, phallic symbolism, a transvestite dwarf, illegitimate children, and a Hitchcockian cameo by Rembrandt himself, all come into play. Greenaway complements his revisionist art history with witty dramatic recreations of these conspiracy theories that reference Rembrandt’s own aesthetic in their elegant framing and lighting.

THE NETHERLANDS • 2008 • 86 MINS. • IN ENGLISH • Filmsource information